Doodle Jump is now an icon of iPhone gaming, but it almost died at launch after selling just 21 copies on its first day of release. How did developer Lima Sky get from there to Doodle Jump being a more famous app than anything not called Angry Birds? The answer is a strange mix of snack food, bubble wrap, blogger nagging, brotherly co-operation and sheer luck.
There is a legitimate, free version of Angry Birds for Android. But one app that appeared on the Android Market (now Google Play) last year wasn’t it. It was a fake, a piece of malware explicitly designed to part phone owners from their cash. Now, the scammers that took the money have been ordered to give it back.
GameFly’s made some interesting movies in the last few months. They jumped into the digital distribution space last year, offering games for streaming in addition to their physical mail rentals. While that moved GameFly’s overall offering closer to that of Steam, they still relied on publishers to supply their pipelines with games. That’s going to change a bit, at least on the smartphone side.
Adult Swim games sure do seem to be on a roll when it comes to goofy animal games. Their incredible browser game Robot Unicorn Attack is one of the most simple pleasures you can find online, and their new universal iOS game Extinction Squad is just as enjoyable, if perhaps a bit less joyfully bizarre.
One of the most popular tower defence games of all time, Fieldrunners has been charming and challenging players on the iPhone, iPad, Android devices, the PSP, PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo DSi since 2008. Subatomic Studios is finally ready to release a sequel, giving fans only a month to get their affairs in order.
Die Gute Fabrik’s hugely enjoyable screenless indie game Johann Sebastian Joust is the latest victim of app-store cloning. An iOS game called Papa Quash released yesterday apes not only Joust‘s core mechanical idea, but shamelessly lifts its marketing, imagery and overall vibe.
